ah, the joy of having a fast computer again

Friday, September 03, 2004, at 11:25AM

By Eric Richardson

I mentioned Wednesday that I was finally going to update my computer. Well, that evening I went to Fry's and got scared by how many different motherboards there were to choose from. I finally ended up with a Shuttle AN35N-Ultra motherboard, an AMD Athlon 3000 processor, and 1gig of RAM. Of course I got it all home and realized that my power supply was too old to power it all... who knew that in the last 5 years they went to ATX12V power supplies?

Yesterday I picked up a $30 power supply at Staples and got the whole setup powered up. It took me a while to track down some performance issues (APIC and nforce2 don't play well together, or something), but last night I got that all settled out and got Linux running great.

Then, I had to go and try to get Windows XP running. Now, first off this got complicated because it turns out I don't actually have any XP installation media. I got XP with my laptop, but Toshiba only ships a recovery DVD that has a ghost image of the factory-setup drive on it. So I have XP on my laptop, and I want it on my desktop... How do I accomplish that? Here's how (on the laptop, in Linux):

dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh 192.168.1.2 dd of=/dev/sda1

Now, you'll notice that I'm putting XP on a SCSI drive on the desktop (since that's what I had lying around). I don't run SCSI on my laptop, obviously, so first go round it presented an issue to try to boot off SCSI. I'd just get the boot menu and then it would reboot. But this morning I thought to install my SCSI driver on the laptop, then copy the drive over.

That worked like a charm. I now have a dual-boot desktop for the first time in like four years.

Just for posterity, the grub commands to boot windows off my SCSI drive:

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot